2012 Excelian high performance computing maturity benchmark

Overview: Grid technology in banking is now over 10 years old. With age has come maturity: grid today is less a specialist technology and more a commodity in its own right. Today, almost all investment banks of whatever tier have a grid solution of some sort, be that 20 cores servicing a 3rd party trading application or 20,000 cores providing enterprise grid services. Early adopters of grid in the late 90s had to create their own solutions, drawing on success in the scientific and technical world or making use of enterprise compute solutions such as SOA and middleware. Later adopters could have been able to exploit third party tools such as Tibco GridServer, IBM Platform Symphony and now Microsoft HPC is also gaining momentum.

At the same time, pressure is still there to increase compute capabilities and the technology landscape seems to be about to change again, with the potential introduction of disruptive technologies like GPGPU, Cloud or Big Data. Risk management is the main driver for this race to more compute, with Counterparty Risk / CVA being a current hot topic in the industry.

With this in mind, Excelian, as the premier high performance computing consultancy in the City has conducted a new edition of their survey of its customers to help them baseline themselves against each other and against a model of grid maturity that will help them plan and define their grid strategy for the next decade.